But Is It Art?

place in the world of culture – nevermind their large bank balances – in the face of the redefinition of art as whatever you want it to be. It seems to me that the main way this has been accomplished over the last few decades has been by promoting the cult of the artist: that is, by presenting the artist as some sort of cultural shaman with special gifts, whose work has significance not for its intrinsic merits, but simply because of its connection to the artist. The artists transfer their magical potency to their works of art, which acquire their value, in a quasi-religious way, from who made them.

It’s also worth noting the language that people like Mark Lawson use to defend their position. Those who criticise postmodern art are conservatives, anti-modernists, reactionaries railing against the forces of progress. Somehow (in the Sixties? or back to Dada again?) politics has crept into the equation, and art has been co-opted into the battle against the forces of reaction. So a tired piece of conceptual art has to be defended because of its presumed progressive and liberatory potential, and the defenders can pat themselves on the back as being up-to-date, modern, and on the right side of history.

That anti-modernist label also implies that the blinkered mindset which laughed at Picasso or sneered at Van Gogh is the same one now criticising Tracey’s unmade bed or this latest plinth masterpiece: as though it’s still the same battle between progressives and the forces of reaction, between the thrusting young rebels and the classically-trained academicians, between cutting-edge street art and Women’s Institute water-colour exhibitions. That’s why I think we should refer to postmodern as opposed to modern art, to distinguish the vital and powerful art movements of the end of the 19th and much of the 20th Centuries from the vapid and sterile art world we’re now lumbered with. This is not a story of steady progress – a sort of Whig history of art – where each new generation revolts against the old order and surpasses them, only to set up their own orthodoxy etc. etc.. It’s a story of how a large part of the current art world has disappeared up its own arse in recent times: a large part, but, as the artists now showing at the National Portrait Gallery demonstrate, thankfully not all.